Doctors and Prescription Drug Addiction
Without a doubt, drug companies have developed and distribute medications that are helpful, even life-saving if properly administered to patients. But prescription abuse runs rampant in the system. This abuse is especially prevalent in Pain Management. 
Doctors treat patients for pain. Most of the complaints are certainly legitimate. People suffer maladies and injuries that only opiates can temper. The problem is most doctors are not savvy about addiction. How often we have heard stories from drug dependent patients who were advised by their primary physician that when they had finished running the course of Vicodin, Oxycontin or Percocet, the patient would be able to simply wean off these narcotics. But more often than not they cannot do this. Patients become dependent on these meds very quickly (often between three and four days) and stopping is simply not easy. In fact, it can be downright dangerous.
Many doctors, never having experienced withdrawal, are ill-informed. It is difficult to appreciate the agony of common opiate withdrawal symptoms like sleeplessness, vomiting, anxiety, diarrhea, night sweats, hyper-sensitivity to temperature and depression.
Patients are treated without an “exit strategy.” It’s a bit like our troops in Iraq. Once in – how do we get them out? Once in the patient’s system, once the brain’s chemistry has been changed, how do we get them out? How do we deal with the cravings for these drugs once addicted? Patients will commonly experience profound urges to take these medications for weeks or months after they have stopped taking them. The drugs will call to them, consume their thoughts. The urge becomes obsessive.
Common, too, is the prescription drug abuse from the patient abusing the quantities of the medication. They start at a given dosage level, but soon become dependent on the euphoric sensation. They take at first one pill more than ordered. Then two, three, four at a time. The continued ability to reach the same euphoric levels become more difficult and it becomes necessary to take more and more. Often the doctor is forced to stop prescribing these medications. Then, typically, the patient goes doctor shopping until he finds another physician, unfamiliar with the patient’s treatment history, who will provide them with another prescription. The new doctor has no way of determining a patient’s real pain level. They can look at an MRI or X-ray, see the damage, but it gives the doctor no indication of how much it hurts. Some patients are treatment savvy and build medical histories, knowing full well that their charts will enable doctors to readily supply them with the drugs they need to get high.
And the pharmacies have no tracking system. The will respect a script from any and all doctors who can legitimately write them. Once again – this is big business and there are billions of dollars to be made. So the pharmacies, also lubricated by the drug companies, are willing or tacit participants in this New Age Drug Culture. Meanwhile, more and more people fall victim to the consequences of their newfound prescription drug addiction.
Should there be requirements for addiction education for doctors? Absolutely. Doctors must be educated about the addictive effects of painkillers and opiates in order to safely prescribe these medications and also properly monitor the progress of patients.
What do you think about education requirements for physicians? Is this so unreasonable??
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